By Peter Berton

FREDERICTON, Canada – Crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford saw the Canadian media limelight stolen from his antics this week by — what else? — online porn.

Graduate-level research led a student and her professor at the University of New Brunswick to declare “teen” and “MILF” the most popular sex-related search terms online — by far.

“No one’s searching for 30-year-olds,” PhD candidate and lead researcher Sarah Vannier told Canada’s National Post newspaper.

Vannier and her supervising professor, Lucia O’Sullivan, gathered and analyzed the data. The Journal of Sex Research subsequently published their report, “Schoolgirls and Soccer Moms: A Content Analysis of Free ‘Teen’ and ‘MILF’ Online Pornography.”

Exposing the most popular sex-related search terms represented only the first step toward the researchers’ goal. Vannier and O’Sullivan also investigated how sex is portrayed in popular porn niches. Ultimately, they hope to shed light on whether and how pornography may influence people’s attitudes about sex.

“There’s a lot of talk, a lot of worry, a lot of speculation about the impact that porn is having on young people’s social norms or perceptions of what their friends are doing and so on,” O’Sullivan told the Post. “There’s lots of talk about it but there’s actually no data on it….”

Although teens and MILFs might appear to be at opposite ends of a spectrum, Vannier and O’Sullivan concluded the sex acts portrayed in the two niches are virtually identical. The differences between the two categories lie primarily in the purported ages of the performers and how the sex acts are presented.

“Aggression or really obvious forms of exploitation were relatively rare, and really non-existent in the MILF porn,” O’Sullivan told the Post. In teen porn, however, “young women come in and have to audition as a porn actress to see how well they might do. You can tell they’re not particularly happy.”

Much so-called teen porn presents the performers as naïve youngsters whose scene partners frequently take an aggressive, exploitive approach to the young woman’s purported introduction to hardcore sex, the researchers noted. That finding bears more research vis-à-vis real-world attitudes, they said.

Vannier and O’Sullivan also determined fellatio occurs far more often than cunnilingus in online porn.

“For me, that was a fun little finding, where what was happening in the porn [world] mapped onto the statistics we have about real life,” Vannier told the Post.